What to Do with Rover and Snowball When You Sell Your Home

When you sell your house, how should you deal with your pets? Let me start with a story.

I sold a house for a gentleman who owned a seemingly nice pit bull. The dog was calm until one day when I had to go to his house when the owner wasn’t home. I let myself in and the dog was still calm until I made my way to the back door to get to the back yard.

He got between me and the back door looking like a combination of angry and hungry. I made my way to the side of the house to try and get to the backyard from the side gate, but the gate wasn’t very easy to climb. The dog had followed me, and as I failed to climb the fence, the dog came after me looking like he was about to attack me. Imagine the scariest dog in the world coming in to kill you!

Luckily I remembered what to do when an animal attacks, so I put my arms up in the air and said ‘Go away!’ repeatedly. The dog went from being viscous to tilting his head and looking confused before he just walked away. Needless to say, I made it out alive.

So what’s the right way to handle your pets when selling your home? There are four issues you need to address; odor, escaping, attacking, and scaring/annoying/distracting someone.

Pet odor can cost you big time. A $500,000 house that has bad pet odor can lose up to $25,000 because of it. I’ve seen people walk into a house and right back out because of pet odors.

Taking care of pet odors could require professional carpet cleaning, carpet and pad replacement, and in some cases, it could require treating the concrete floor slab. Pet odors can make their way into furniture as well. With cats, litter boxes can be an issue.

“The main issues with pets during a home sale are odors, escape, and distraction.”

The last issues of pets escaping or distracting people can be solved by a dog run. If you don’t have a dog run, you can put up an inexpensive gate on the side of your house to keep your pets—dogs especially—from becoming an issue.

You could also consider boarding your pets. If you don’t want to board them, you can always try to have them stay with a friend or relative, or even take them with you. If you just have a tiny dog who won’t run away and just wants to lick people, it might be OK to leave them at the house. Just make sure they don’t run away or bite anyone.

Hopefully this information is helpful to you if you’re selling your house. If you’re thinking about selling your house in the San Diego market, I’d love to help you. Just give me a call or send me an email soon and let’s keep this conversation going.